I learned about Bitcoin about a decade ago, and I felt indifferent. I read numerous forum posts and could have absolutely have invested $100 and made a lot of money, but I chose not to because I thought the entire thing sounded like it predominantly benefitted criminals. When I heard about Ethereum, I was somewhat more curious - if only because it sounded like it was more than just moving money - only to find that every product was awkward and expensive to use. Advocates back in 2015 would insist that this was the future of software, that it was “early days” and that I would quickly be proven wrong.
It's also disingenuous to say that the Internet took decades to become valuable. It took decades to become as valuable as it is now, because it's existed for exactly that many decades -- the long way around of stating a tautology.
The fact is that the Internet was instantly valuable to some people, just not immediately monetized. Now there are a bunch of hucksters trying to reverse that sequence for themselves at the expense of the inattentive.
Important point to mention: Roose's previous Twitter thread in which he asked *why* journalists couldn't be invested in the assets they were writing about, if it was crypto?
The piece makes a lot more sense as an attempt to make his case to write with a massive conflict of interest.
The problem seems to be even simpler to define: this is not a mass market product or technology. Investing, which is essentially what much of this boils down to, is a niche passion, not a mass market one. (And crypto/blockchain is a subset of that niche passion) And few of the people explaining this new ecosystem are particularly well versed in investing--they're tech writers.
Even the non-investing use cases (NFT owners can help shape storylines for a movie or video game) are of interest to a limited number of people, the vast majority preferring to lean back and let someone else tell them a story.
Which is not to say that someday it might not all have a mass market application and change the world as we know it. Just that right now it seems cultish because a whole lot of people find investing and markets confusing and boring and have zero interest in learning more about it.
Compare that to Facebook, whose value prop, as you note, was immediately apparent to the mass market.
There’s at least some reason to believe that Etherium might end up being different from the other blockchain currencies, because it is designed to execute code on the chain. The others generally don’t. Paying Etherium to be able to execute code on the chain makes at least some sense as a concept. Your points about the remaining problems with Etherium seriously undercut that possibility. Why execute code on Etherium when it costs so much? Only a small fraction of possible code-executions ought to go onto Etherium at those prices.
While I agree with most of this article, I mist poimt out from a Global South perspective that crypto has been the greatest economic inclusion gift in my lifetime and many of my African contemporaries. For years (decades?), we were arbitrarily locked out of global freelancing/consulting opportunities by the likes of PayPal, which infamously built a huge clandestine float by accepting payments going to African remote workers, then refusing to remit it.
Crypto has completely taken these gatekeepers out of the picture by creating a decentralised alternative to receiving and making payments. For many of us, this has had genuinely life-changing effects. Apart from the fact that we are now able to participate in the global skills economy in ways we were locked out of before and thus multiply our earnings directly, this participation has had a notable effect on wages in our own offline economies, particularly in tech and tach-adjacent spaces like content creation, copywriting etc.
It's no coincidence that after African remote workers stopped pleading with PayPal to stop arbitrarily freezing their accounts and stealing their money, and instead switched to crypto payments, PayPal suddenly realised that its treatment of African users was wrong, and it quickly started working with local payment processors to find a solution - 10 years after the complaints began.
A lot of the crypto space is indeed hot, steaming bullshit, and crypto bros do often come across as the offspring of religious cultists and 4chan dummies, but it is impossible to reach a conclusion about the basic utility of crypto without accounting for what it has done and is doing for the lives of skilled remote workers in the Global South.
What baffles me about big media's coverage of crypto is they normally love to report on all sorts of topics: sexism, racism, the alt-right, corporate corruption, consumer scams, frauds, big industry destroying the environment, and even a few on the evils of a hyper-consumer or hyper-capitalist economy.
But, when it comes to crypto, which has examples of all of the above, they largely give crypto companies and players a pass.
A few years back, Tim Bray (XML among other things, he's a name for serious nerds), asked were the blockchain apps were. 14 years after the dawn of the PC (1975) and the dawn of the internet (1988), it was obvious that they were a big deal. Blockchain has nothing, NFT are just a bad url shortener. Still wish I'd mined a bunch in 2008 and then sat on them.
FWIW video game is a broader term than computer game (includes games being played on consoles, mobile devices, etc.) So in this rare instance Roose wasn't wrong.
In March of 2020, the Federal Reserve sent five trillion dollars out the door as part of the pandemic emergency plan to save the economy, which included purchasing Treasury bonds on the open market. The process of quantitative easing has the effective *point* of pushing stable investors into taking greater and greater risks.
The fact that Bitcoin had fallen to about $5k before they did this and then we saw this weird financialized bubble of excessive risk-taking is surely a coincidence.
Tangential aside: the line between ‘computer games’ and traditional ‘video games’ (i.e. console-based) is increasingly fuzzy these days and as someone on the younger-ish side, the term ‘computer games’ sounds dated. YMMV, but I most often see ‘video game’ used for any electronic game regardless of platform. It would have read weirdly to me to have been computer games in the article.
“I know some greasy pedant is going to claim that I’m conflating cryptocurrency and blockchain. I am doing so because Ethereum, Solana, and other dominant decentralized networks are built on cryptocurrencies. If you want me to separate them out, give me a reason to - show me a non-cryptocurrency blockchain product that actually matters.”
Git and ZFS are both non-currency blockchains that actually matter, but the fact that they are non-currency blockchains is usually cited as a disqualifier for being counted under the buzzword “blockchain”.
That said, I like to joke that Microsoft is the blockchain company because they own GitHub, and I like to joke that blockchains in the cryptocurrency sense are just Git repositories that use a janky merge-resolution lottery. (It should come as no surprise that some of the biggest blockchain security compromises have come from cryptoheads being terrible at managing Git repositories.)
It's weird but I really like living in a world in which one guy with a newsletter *consistently* makes more sense than the New York Times.
It's also disingenuous to say that the Internet took decades to become valuable. It took decades to become as valuable as it is now, because it's existed for exactly that many decades -- the long way around of stating a tautology.
The fact is that the Internet was instantly valuable to some people, just not immediately monetized. Now there are a bunch of hucksters trying to reverse that sequence for themselves at the expense of the inattentive.
Important point to mention: Roose's previous Twitter thread in which he asked *why* journalists couldn't be invested in the assets they were writing about, if it was crypto?
The piece makes a lot more sense as an attempt to make his case to write with a massive conflict of interest.
The problem seems to be even simpler to define: this is not a mass market product or technology. Investing, which is essentially what much of this boils down to, is a niche passion, not a mass market one. (And crypto/blockchain is a subset of that niche passion) And few of the people explaining this new ecosystem are particularly well versed in investing--they're tech writers.
Even the non-investing use cases (NFT owners can help shape storylines for a movie or video game) are of interest to a limited number of people, the vast majority preferring to lean back and let someone else tell them a story.
Which is not to say that someday it might not all have a mass market application and change the world as we know it. Just that right now it seems cultish because a whole lot of people find investing and markets confusing and boring and have zero interest in learning more about it.
Compare that to Facebook, whose value prop, as you note, was immediately apparent to the mass market.
There’s at least some reason to believe that Etherium might end up being different from the other blockchain currencies, because it is designed to execute code on the chain. The others generally don’t. Paying Etherium to be able to execute code on the chain makes at least some sense as a concept. Your points about the remaining problems with Etherium seriously undercut that possibility. Why execute code on Etherium when it costs so much? Only a small fraction of possible code-executions ought to go onto Etherium at those prices.
While I agree with most of this article, I mist poimt out from a Global South perspective that crypto has been the greatest economic inclusion gift in my lifetime and many of my African contemporaries. For years (decades?), we were arbitrarily locked out of global freelancing/consulting opportunities by the likes of PayPal, which infamously built a huge clandestine float by accepting payments going to African remote workers, then refusing to remit it.
Crypto has completely taken these gatekeepers out of the picture by creating a decentralised alternative to receiving and making payments. For many of us, this has had genuinely life-changing effects. Apart from the fact that we are now able to participate in the global skills economy in ways we were locked out of before and thus multiply our earnings directly, this participation has had a notable effect on wages in our own offline economies, particularly in tech and tach-adjacent spaces like content creation, copywriting etc.
It's no coincidence that after African remote workers stopped pleading with PayPal to stop arbitrarily freezing their accounts and stealing their money, and instead switched to crypto payments, PayPal suddenly realised that its treatment of African users was wrong, and it quickly started working with local payment processors to find a solution - 10 years after the complaints began.
A lot of the crypto space is indeed hot, steaming bullshit, and crypto bros do often come across as the offspring of religious cultists and 4chan dummies, but it is impossible to reach a conclusion about the basic utility of crypto without accounting for what it has done and is doing for the lives of skilled remote workers in the Global South.
This is tulip mania for the digital age.
What baffles me about big media's coverage of crypto is they normally love to report on all sorts of topics: sexism, racism, the alt-right, corporate corruption, consumer scams, frauds, big industry destroying the environment, and even a few on the evils of a hyper-consumer or hyper-capitalist economy.
But, when it comes to crypto, which has examples of all of the above, they largely give crypto companies and players a pass.
A few years back, Tim Bray (XML among other things, he's a name for serious nerds), asked were the blockchain apps were. 14 years after the dawn of the PC (1975) and the dawn of the internet (1988), it was obvious that they were a big deal. Blockchain has nothing, NFT are just a bad url shortener. Still wish I'd mined a bunch in 2008 and then sat on them.
FWIW video game is a broader term than computer game (includes games being played on consoles, mobile devices, etc.) So in this rare instance Roose wasn't wrong.
In March of 2020, the Federal Reserve sent five trillion dollars out the door as part of the pandemic emergency plan to save the economy, which included purchasing Treasury bonds on the open market. The process of quantitative easing has the effective *point* of pushing stable investors into taking greater and greater risks.
The fact that Bitcoin had fallen to about $5k before they did this and then we saw this weird financialized bubble of excessive risk-taking is surely a coincidence.
Tangential aside: the line between ‘computer games’ and traditional ‘video games’ (i.e. console-based) is increasingly fuzzy these days and as someone on the younger-ish side, the term ‘computer games’ sounds dated. YMMV, but I most often see ‘video game’ used for any electronic game regardless of platform. It would have read weirdly to me to have been computer games in the article.
“I know some greasy pedant is going to claim that I’m conflating cryptocurrency and blockchain. I am doing so because Ethereum, Solana, and other dominant decentralized networks are built on cryptocurrencies. If you want me to separate them out, give me a reason to - show me a non-cryptocurrency blockchain product that actually matters.”
Git and ZFS are both non-currency blockchains that actually matter, but the fact that they are non-currency blockchains is usually cited as a disqualifier for being counted under the buzzword “blockchain”.
That said, I like to joke that Microsoft is the blockchain company because they own GitHub, and I like to joke that blockchains in the cryptocurrency sense are just Git repositories that use a janky merge-resolution lottery. (It should come as no surprise that some of the biggest blockchain security compromises have come from cryptoheads being terrible at managing Git repositories.)